I recently bought a boatload of old 1960s-1970s Gold Key horror/mystery comic book scans from this guy’s online store, and have been plowing through them.

It’s been a lot of childhood nostalgia, as well as a lot of memory-poking of old stories and the actual old comic books I’ve got boxed up & totally unorganized (perhaps a summer project might be going through them all & fixing that). The actual copies of these things are pretty tough to find and aren’t too cheap, so the digitized deal is quite the good one, if you enjoy this sort of crap.

And I certainly do!

I started out reading the complete run of the Dark Shadows series, all 35 of ’em. I have one actual issue of the thing, bought by my mom since we were both fans of the actual show at the time, and it disappointed both of us.

And in reading the rest, the reasons for that disappointment so many years ago still stand – while the Gold Key DS series reproduces a few of the characters from the show & utilizes vampire/werewolf/witchcraft plotlines, it doesn’t have the tone of the show at all. The art is also poor – the only character who looks like her TV counterpart is Joan Bennett’s Elizabeth. Barnabas the vampire is the main character & hero of the thing, but Julia’s role from the TV show is reduced to nothing, and Angelique only turns up a few times to torment him as a ghost. And they don’t look anything like Grayson Hall and Lara Parker, nor does Barnabas look like Jonathan Frid.

Later comic book versions of the thing I perused on Amazon are far truer to the look & feel of the 1966 TV series, and anything beats the forced campiness of the Tim Burton movie. I trudged through them, a couple of the stories weren’t too bad, but overall, weak tea.

Then I started on two different comics I had a few issues of back in the day – The Twilight Zone and Ripley’s True Ghost Stories. Both of these titles began in the early 1960s and ended around 1980 or so.

The T-Zones have a wider range of stories, from offbeat scifi to eerie revenge tales, similar to the TV show. A comic Rod Serling serves as narrator, and while the art is generic, there are clear attempts by the artists to crib the look of some characters from familiar faces of TV actors who you’d expect to turn up on the show. While many of the stories are formulaic and hit a real dead spot in the mid 1970s before recovering somewhat before the title ended, a lot of them are pretty good. Much like the show, you can categorize the stories into various sub-genres: someone changes identity (either via clothes, bodies, faces, masks, etc) and things go right or more often wrong; someone gets wishes granted and things go wrong; someone enters the past/alternate dimension/reality and must escape;weird unreal stuff happens to someone ordinary and then we find out we’re not in an ordinary world, a la “Eye of the Beholder,” etc.

The Ripley’s stories are all along similar lines – someone in the present or the past comes across some place that’s haunted, some local or creepy caretaker tells them the sad story of some wrongful death that resulted in the ghost, and they either GTFO or find a way to put the spirit to rest. The best of these are either the creepiest, such as one tale of a voodoo shaman with a sugar cane harvesting zombie army who try to dig their way back into their own graves, or ones where the “believe it or not” aspect is most likely true – like the story of two graverobbers who accidentally revive the “corpse” whose jewels they try to steal – a young woman who then returns home after being mistaken for dead and several years later gives birth to Sir Walter Scott.

I’m moving through the Grimm’s Ghost Stories series and the Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery ones now, more on those later. In the meantime, here’s one of my favorite stories from the collection so far… read it & you’ll see why I’ve always liked it. It’s written (uncredited) by the legendary comic writer Len Wein. Link to PDF: A Thing About Cats

The pilot for a proposed TV horror anthology to be called Portraits of Terror, “Final Curtain” features Wood regular Duke Moore as an actor lurking around the old Santa Monica Dome Theater after hours while Plan 9′s Dudley Manlove narrates his night of…. TERROR!!!!

Oh Dear God, is it ever tedious. The entirety of the thing is the voice over narration, written as an attempt at Edgar Allen Poe style inner psycho breakdown. And in the end, basically nothing really happens.

I devoted a fair chunk of my undergraduate thesis to the work of Ed Wood, and while some of the wonderful auteur touches are here, it’s very stripped down and lacking a lot of the stuff that elevates Ed Wood’s material to that special level of camp. Manlove’s voice-over has moments of over-the-top emotion that don’t match the stiff-as-board acting that goes with it, and Wood tips his hand a little too much in one segment where Moore’s actor character caresses the wardrobe of an actress playing a stage dummy and the narration goes on and on about how the feel of her clothes against his skin excite him sexually. Ah, but it’s no angora sweater, is it?

BUT WAIT! It’s a cut to a shot of a water cooler!

AND OVER THERE! PIPES!

AND THERE! SEATS!!!!

AUUGGHHHHHHHHH!!!! I’M TERRIFIED!

This needed a hearty dose of Criswell, Tor Johnson, and that guy in the devil suit from the Glen or Glenda? dream sequence. THEN the networks would have bitten, I’m sure.

Wood being Wood, much of the footage of this thing was recycled into parts of Night Of The Ghouls. What he really should have done was try pitching this one to the networks instead:

Trust me, those really are the highlights. I never thought that strippers in a graveyard would bore me before Ed Wood got a hold of the idea. But then, that’s the price I pay for academic thoroughness!

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